Allow me to offer you this photo to make a point:
Perhaps you are wondering where this came from. Well, it came from me. I was on the United Airlines home page (indeed, I am at the airport now, getting ready to crisscross our once-great nation) and was amused – – and a bit flabbergasted – – to see that this not-quite-right photo was featured on the home page of one of the largest airlines on the planet.
It reminds me of a Steve Jobs story. I don’t remember it word for word, but the gist of it was something like this: at some point early in his life, he realized that individual human beings made everything. The Golden Gate Bridge. The Empire State Building. The Apollo rocket. The Great Pyramid. Everything.
This, for him, was a revelation, and it’s something I bet many people die without even realizing. When we come into this world, we stand in awe of just about everything. Even as adults, we gawk with amazement at things that we don’t understand, simply because we don’t have the knowledge or the experience.
But the fact is that some person, or some people, created everything you see. And that can be a tremendously exciting realization, because it helps you understand that you, too, have this possibility within yourself. It really is best to embrace a certain degree of ignorance about what you “can” and “cannot” do.
The flip side of this, however, is that even huge corporations are capable of big mistakes. Some of them are catastrophic, and others, like the one above, are silly and minor. Oftentimes it comes down to one person simply not being very thorough about their job.
And, with that, I shall sign off for now, as I am heading to the Chicago area and then to subsequent destinations. I was wanting to do one last post, but I had to think of something to write about. The youngster in the photo provided a way to my goal, since he made the topic easy to pick.
